Monthly Archives: June 2014
Abracadabra . . .
Or our version of the Magical Mystery Tour.
Or at least the Michigan portion of it.
We all headed out about 9:30 with our first stop the only non-magical part. Nick want to get a photo of the grave of Sojourner Truth, a former slave and African-American abolitionist and women’s rights activist.
Located in Battle Creek, MI, her grave lies near the graves of such cereal luminaries as members of the Post and Kellogg families.
Our next stop was in Marshal, MI at the American Museum of Magic.
The collection of magic artifacts was assembled by, and the museum started by Robert Lund, who, in his day job, was an well-known automobile writer, including Auto Editor for Popular Mechanics magazine.
Although not a magician himself, Lund was fascinated by magic and magicians since he was a young boy and collected everything he could, including the thousands of posters and playbills that lined the walls.
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I’ll let Nick give you more info, but I was impressed by two artifacts in the museum. The first is one of the three remaining Milk Cans used by Harry Houdini as part of his famous escape routines.
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And on a more modern note, they have two suits worn by Penn and Teller, the well-known present day magicians.
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After a quick lunch at McDonald’s, we headed over to Colon, MI, home of two magic trick manufacturers, and a yearly Magic Get-Together where over 1000 magic enthusiasts show up.
Colon became a hotbed of magic due to the fact the famous magician Harry Blackstone, Sr. bought a farm here in the 1920’s, and many fellow magicians flocked to the area. In fact, Blackstone, Sr, and his son-magician Harry Blackstone, Jr., are both buried in the local cemetery, as well as many other well-known magicians.
After visiting the cemetery, we headed back to Elkhart after a really fun day. You might even say a ‘magical’ day. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
Later, after we’d been home for a while, we all headed out to have dinner at Culver’s. Really love their burgers.
Back home, about 8pm, blog reader Bob Plaskon stops by to see Nick, who invited me over to meet him in person.
We all sat outside talking until finally the dark, and the mosquitos finally drove us inside.
Tomorrow, maybe nothing.
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Thought for the Day:
"I liked ’em when I was 18. Why should I stop liking ’em now?" – George Burns, on why he kept the company of women 70 years younger than himself.
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Biting the Bullet . . .
After yesterday’s pretty much all day rain, today turned out to be really nice outside. So we were able to sit out with our coffee and muffins, and Nick and Terry. And even better, a little while later Dick and Phyllis Schell showed up for a while.
They’re in the process of doing some upgrades to their Freightliner Super C so they came over before they took their rig down to have some measurements done.
It was so nice that we sat out for about two hours before heading in. A little later Nick and Terry ran some errands while I did some stuff around the rig. Then about 3 Nick and I went down to the Verizon store where I bit the bullet and upgraded my phone to a new Samsung Galaxy S5.
BUT!
I still don’t have contacts. As before we can see them online in Verizon’s BackupAssistantPlus, but the phones, neither my old Samsung Charge nor my new S5, can see them to pull them down. And there doesn’t seem to be a way to push them from the BackupAssistant either. But I’m still working on it.
I do really like the S5 so far though. It’s very fast and has a 16 megapixel camera, better than my Panasonic Lumix.
One thing different is that the phones no longer come with a SD card like my Charge did. It came with an 32GB, and the Verizon Store said that they would sell me one for $49.95.
Yeah, right!
I can get one online for $10-15.
So now I’m spending time re-downloading all my favorite apps to the S5. But it will be a good opportunity to weed out those I really don’t use.
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Our daughter Brandi sent over some new Landon pics.
We really look forward to seeing him for his 4th birthday in August.
For supper tonight we had our leftover King Wha Hunan Chicken from a few nights ago. Still really good, especially with Sriracha Sauce on it.
Down in Texas every Chinese restaurant stocks Sriracha, but up here they don’t seem to have heard of it.
Then a little later, Nick brought over some of Miss Terry’s still-warm,fresh, homemade pastys. Kind of like one of those half-moon apple turnovers or apple pies, but with meat and veggies in them. Boy, were they good!
And the crust was just fantastic. So good in fact, that they would be delicious if they were just made of crust, no filling.
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Nick said tomorrow is going to be just magical. We’ll see.
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Thought for the Day:
"Women are creatures meant to be loved, not to be understood." – Oscar Wilde
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